Creating a database of computer games Essay

I am creating a database of computer games. It is intended to both aid the customer in choosing which game to purchase, if any. It is also intended to aid the staff of the store by easily providing them with any information that they need for whatever reason (for example helping a customer with an enquiry). They have the problems of there being a lot of different computer games available on a number of different ‘platforms’ (different hardware systems), this means that it will either take a long time for a customer to search through all of the games available to them and to find the look of one that they like, or they cannot see all the games that are in stock, for instance there could be some in the stock room that they do not know about. These problems all currently exist in the shop and there is no way of customers to know the information they require, they just have to ask members of staff. This database will help them, as it will display all the games in the shop and the stock room. It will also display the rating given to the game by a reputable independent magazine for that format (CUBE in this case). It will also display a hyperlink to a review for the game, so that they can find out if the game is suitable to their tastes. In this case it takes them to totalgames. net, an affiliate of CUBE magazine, so the reviews are reliable and coincide with the rating. I chose to use a database software package called Microsoft Access because it allows me to satisfy all the requirements of the product I am working on. It allows me to easily enter the data that I have collected in the form Of a table, it then allows me to create queries so that the user can easily sift through all the data and find the information that they require. It also allows forms to be made, which provide an easy and simple user interface, so that all the functions that the user will require are available to them, and they need not go into any other part of the program. It also allows you to create reports and they can then be printed easily. These are all functions that can be performed in a database but not other software such as a spreadsheet or a Word Processor. Analysis I collected my data from a number of different sources; these include a magazine, which has a directory in the back to allow me to collect a lot of the data which I require (see pages and ) . I also used the website http://www. totalgames. net which has a large database of reviews for games, which allowed me to both provide a direct link to a full and comprehensive review for most of the games listed in my database, as well as allowing me to obtain another review score so as to be able to get an average. I also collected data such as prices for the games (which I could not obtain from the other sources) in the database from shops such as GAME(r). I collected the data from the shops using my data capture form, of which a blank example can be found on page and the completed example may be found on page. I validated my data in a number of ways. I created a couple of input masks so that information could not be entered incorrectly; fig 1. 2 displays an error that was displayed if you entered text in a numeric field. Another one was to just check all entries by proof reading them, both as I entered them and then reading through again after entering them. The second was to run a spell check, to pick up on any spelling anomalies and allow me to check the manually. This picked up on a couple of mistakes which I was able to edit (see fig 1. 1 below).